When Masha was four, her mother taught her to tell counterfeit dollars from genuine currency. Being caught with either real or fake foreign money would have been dangerous, punishable under Soviet law by up to fifteen years behind bars,9 but Tatiana seemed incapable of fear. At any rate, this was her livelihood. She also ran a tutoring business: she had started out as a tutor herself, but soon figured out that she needed volume to make real money. She began matching clients—mostly high school students readying to face the grueling oral exams for university admission—with her fellow graduate students, who could prepare them. In her own tutoring, she now stuck to a highly profitable and rare specialty she had developed: she prepared young people to face the "coffins."
"Coffins" were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants. Soviet institutions of higher learning generally fell into two categories: those that admitted no Jews at all and those that admitted a strictly limited number of Jews. The rules of non- admission were not, of course, publicly posted; rejection was administered in a peculiarly sadistic way. Jewish applicants usually took entrance exams along with all the other aspiring students. They pulled examination tickets from the same pool as everyone else. But if they succeeded in answering correctly the two or three questions on the ticket, then, alone in the room with the examiners, they would be casually issued an extra question, as though to follow up on the answers given. This would be the "coffin." In mathematics, this was usually a problem not merely complex but unsolvable. The applicant would falter and founder. The examiners would then nail the cover of the coffin shut: the Jewish applicant had failed the exam. Unless, that is, the applicant had had Tatiana for a tutor. She perfected the art of teaching her clients not merely specific "coffins," which she had somehow managed to procure, but the general algorithm for recognizing them and proving them to be unsolvable. This bucktoothed blonde in aviator glasses could teach Soviet Jews to beat the antisemitic machine, and this kept Masha in caviar and disgusting Central Committee farina.
ZHANNA
TO ACHIEVE ANYTHING even resembling a level playing field, one had to not be Jewish. One's "nationality"—what Americans would call "ethnicity"—was noted in all important identity documents, from birth certificate to internal passport to marriage certificate to personnel file at work or school. Once assigned, "nationality" was virtually unchangeable—and it was passed on from generation to generation. Zhanna's father, Boris, had somehow—most likely through the foresight and effort of his parents—lucked into documents that identified him as ethnically Russian. With his dark brown eyes and dark hair in tight curls, and his parents' identifiably Jewish first names, Dina and Yefim, he was not fooling anyone, but he managed to short-circuit most inquiries by claiming, illogically, to be "half Jewish." This skill, his ethnically correct documents, and top high school marks enabled him to get admission to university. There had been one major obstacle: unlike the overwhelming majority of Soviet high school students, Boris had not joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, and his graduation documents consequently identified him as "politically unreliable." His mother,
Dina Yakovlevna, lobbied the high school to change the wording. It seemed like an impossible undertaking, but it had to be done. In this family, which consisted entirely of natural scientists and medical doctors, everyone was brilliant and everyone was accomplished. The wording was changed. Boris was admitted to the Department of Radio Physics of Gorky State University. He would graduate with top honors and would complete his PhD dissertation by the time he was twenty- four. Consensus among his family and friends was that he would eventually win the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics.
Zhanna was born in 1984, the year Boris finished his dissertation. Her mother, Raisa, was a teacher of French. In Soviet terms, they were a bogema—bohemian—family, which meant that they organized their life in accordance with ideas that seemed Western and in ways that continuously expanded their social circle. They rented a house, while Boris's older sister and her child lived with Dina Yakovlevna, as was the norm. The house, in the dilapidated center of town, was old and wooden and had no bathtub or shower, only a toilet. The family made do—they heated water on the stove and washed over a basin, or showered at friends' houses—and anyway, they were not so Western that they had to shower every day. They were, however, so Western as to play tennis, a rarefied sport that landed the family a photo spread in the city paper when Zhanna was a toddler. All three of the people in the picture had dark hair and white-toothed smiles as wide as their cheekbones. They stood out in their gray city.
The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant "bitter." When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna's birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country's best-known dissident. Sakharov's last name meant "sugar," and from the way Zhanna's father said his name, Zhanna knew there was something magical about him. She begged her father to take her with him when he said he was going to
"Sakharov's building"—she did not realize that he was not actually visiting the great man, just keeping a sort of occasional vigil—but he would not take her. She named her kitten Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov.
Here is how Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, described the city in the spring of 1987, when Zhanna was not quite three years old:
You would think it's not early April but late autumn or the onset of
winter I see pedestrians pulling their feet up out of the puddles
as they walk: heavy, enormous clumps of dirt cling to their shoes. The wind bends treetops right down to the ground. A mix of snow and rain is falling from a dim sky, laying dirty-white stains on the surface of something that I'm not sure deserves to be called
"earth."10
Zhanna was pretty sure hers was the worst city on earth and its bitter name described the lives of those forced to live there, especially her mother. Raisa had to spend most of her time hunting for food. Sometimes she took the train to Moscow—a night to get there, then she would spend the day standing in line, and the next night on the train back. Most often Moscow yielded processed meats, which had not been seen in Gorky in years. Moscow had shortages of its own, but compared with Gorky, where a store might be selling nothing but unidentifiable dark juice in three-liter glass jars with tin covers, Moscow was the land of promise if not of plenty. One time Raisa returned with candy, a clear plastic bag full of sloppily wrapped grayish-brown cylinders. They were soy mixed with sugar, crushed peanuts, and a sprinkling of cocoa powder. Zhanna thought she had never tasted anything better. Another time a friend of Raisa's brought bananas in a gym bag. They were green and hard, and Raisa—who, unlike her daughter, had seen bananas before—knew that they should be kept in a dark cupboard, where they would ripen. Boris did not share in the responsibilities of daily procurement, but occasionally he shone with something he had "reached"—the Soviet term for getting hard-to-find food, and Zhanna thought that her father could "reach" things because he was so very tall. Basically, he was a superhero.